Abstract
What does this presage for notions of political and media leadership? The new social media and the arena of light entertainment favoured by younger citizens, and the blogosphere (which is much more a sphere which skews older and professional than the general population), are not unitary phenomenon. They present opportunities for formal political leadership but these opportunities can only be grasped if traditional command-and-control strategies are rethought.
They both facilitate access to a hard-to-reach younger demographic and can enhance their exposure as they make themselves more accessible, and constrain standard issue politics by upsetting the old inter-elite modes of engagement. They also have facilitated emergent, alternative, forms of political communication and leadership.
What of media leadership? Mainstream media will need to work with the blogosphere rather than attempting to stand over against it as the primary authoritative source of news and information. In Margaret Simon’s estimation: … the media model of the future will be pro-am a small core of media professionals surrounded by, supported and critiqued by a swarm of amateurs who will be both audience and colleagues. If professional journalists are ‘gatekeepers’, able to decide what gets reported and how, they are now going to have to learn to live with increasingly active ‘gatewatchers’ (Bruns 2007), who will both critique what journalists do, and generate their own, different, material.
Cunningham, Stuart D.
Political and Media Leadership in the Age of YouTube.
In Hart, Paul ’t and Uhr, John, eds. Public Leadership: Perspectives and Practices. Canberra: ANU E Press, 177-186.
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